An inquirer to “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, asked this week:
“A year ago, I was told I had a form of ovarian cancer and was given two to three years to live — five years, if I’m in the top quartile of patients. I nursed my husband through metastatic lung cancer for 15 months. It was horrific; I am hoping that God takes me early. My sister, whom I love very much, is part of a fundamentalist Christian church and is one of their top “prayer warriors.” As such, she calls me nearly every day and launches into long prayers asking God to send my cancer to the “foot of the cross.” She implores me to pray with her and says that if I just believe that God will cure me, he will.I grew up Catholic and have fallen away from the church. I believe God is bigger than what we can understand as human beings. I am a data-driven health care practitioner: I believe that everybody has to die of something, and this happens to be my fate. I’ve told her as tactfully as I can that her praying for me and expecting me to pray with her for my cure is upsetting to me. It makes me feel that if there is a God, he must really hate me; otherwise, he would have cured me. (She says that he wants to use me as a “messenger” to others and that it’s the Devil, not God, who gave this disease to me.)…
“What do I say to my sister without belittling her beliefs? I’ve told her that if she wants to pray for me, I would rather she do it on her own time and not ask me to participate. But she is persistent, thinking that she’s going to “save my soul” and my body at the same time. She disputes every reason that I give her and insists that what she is doing is helpful. But it’s not helpful; it sends me into a terrible depression.”
I have always found the kind of aggressive proselytizing about the power of prayer described in the question obnoxious and presumptuous, not to mention logically absurd, but don’t get me started on that. I remember a TV debate on a local Boston show called “Crackerbarrel” between infamous atheist Madeline Murrey O’Hare and a religious fanatic known as “Mrs. Warren” who had gained some momentary fame protesting at my father’s bank, which was, she said, defying God because it was foreclosing on her home. O’Hare said she has abandoned prayer as worthless after her son disappeared in the Amazon jungles years ago: she had prayed for his safe return in vain. “Oh, you can never stop praying!” Mrs. Warren said. “I will pray for your son now, and if you pray too, God may hear you!” I called the show’s viewer call-in line, got through the screeners, and when they let my call on the air, I shouted “MOM! I’m back!” Then they cut me off. O’Hare thought my joke was hilarious. (I have come to understand that it was in bad taste, but my point was valid, and I was only 19 at the time.)
But I digress. The prayer-happy sister had a right to make her case once, and the letter writer was correct to listen politely, since it is her sister, after all. Anything more after that about the power of prayer to cure cancer is harassment. The “I am going to save your soul” bit is equally bad—condescending and disrespectful. The proper response to that is “Bite me!”
Once the obligatory unsolicited advice has been tolerated, the next step is, “With all due respect, sis, shut up. I’ve heard enough from you.” If she persists after that, there is nothing unethical about “belittling her beliefs.” The delusion that prayer and faith are effective substitutes for medical treatment has been responsible for countless needless deaths through the centuries, and many of those deaths have been children. People have a right to whatever crack-brained opinion,s beliefs and convictions that creep into their minds, but at a certain point, rebuttals are required.
What would you say to Pious Sis?
Ethics Alarms 
Quote part of Psalm 37:
“…be still before the Lord…” and hope she doesn’t read the rest of the passage.
!
“At this point, what makes you think that pestering me is going to do any good? I get that you don’t want to lose me, but everyone has to die sometime, and my soul is not yours to judge. You said your piece; any further attempts to ‘save’ me will get you cut off”.
As a religious person, several scriptures immediately came to my mind in response to the “all you need is prayer” notion.
First, Matthew 4:6-7, where Satan tempts Jesus to jump off the top of the temple to prove himself. Jesus’s response: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”
In the story of the Good Samaritan, the title character doesn’t just pray for the victim, he sterilized and bandages his wounds, then takes him to an inn and pays for his care.
In 2 Corinthians 12:7-9, Paul talks about a “thorn in the flesh” that he asks three times for removal. The response?
“And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
Both believers and non-believers err in expecting God to be some genie that makes all problems go away. Even those who ARE miraculously healed must still pass on eventually. What we will be judged on is not how long we lived, but HOW we lived.
Great answer.
The “prayer solves everything” approach undermines belief in religion because of its pure fact-defiant fanaticism.
I would hazard to guess prayer does in fact do something for the prayer.
And there’s always this, which is nice:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Bill+murray+caddie+shack+eternal+life+scene&view=detail&mid=AD35A842972C2C981BD1AD35A842972C2C981BD1&FORM=VIRE
Also, Matthew 6:6-8.
Pretty simple to enforce a boundary that the phone call ends as soon as God is called into the conference, because prayer is more effective when done in secret.
Content warning: Deconstruction of monotheistic beliefs.
The useful function of prayer is prompting observation and reflection in the one praying, not altering the physical world.
A gambling addict will play the slot machine for hours, always certain the next round will be their win. Thousands of dollars later, they might make fifty of it back, and to them that vindicates their certainty. The same thing happens when people pray for a desired outcome. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
Existentialism says, “Deity is as deity does.” People’s predictions based on their belief in a higher power that intervenes in mortal affairs are inconsistent to the point of incoherence. It takes doublethink to be certain that a good thing will happen or a bad thing won’t because a benevolent entity controls everything, considering how many bad things have happened that we would not expect to see under the watch of such a being.
“Our deity has given us free will, and refuses to interfere with our choices. We can freely choose to follow the deity’s commands and receive eternal reward, or disobey and receive eternal punishment.”
“Our deity won’t interfere to prevent people from hurting the innocent, so we have to take on that responsibility ourselves. We trust that our deity will give us the brute strength and skill we need to prevail over evil, if we are men or Joan of Arc, or miraculously manipulate events so that our enemies fail of their own accord, if we are women or children.”
“Suffering in life is ultimately acceptable, because obedient people will receive an eternal reward in the afterlife. We must avoid going to that blissful afterlife for as long as possible, up to and including begging our deity to prolong our mortal lives in the face of disaster and disease originally conjured by the deity itself.”
“Thou shalt not kill… people who worship our deity our way. Unless thou hast an overwhelming yearning to conquer thy neighbor’s nation, ethnic group, or rival gang, in which case have at them.”
The behavior of the faithful doesn’t match their words. Most humans don’t really believe these statements about reality, when their own personal goals are at stake. They just make the noises to feel better about being fragile organisms with very strong desires that are often frustrated.
The tragic part is that there are paths to becoming better as individuals and as a society, but getting caught up in a placebo of platitudes largely obscures the deeper understanding required for navigating those paths.
No offense, EC, but there also isn’t a lot of deconstruction here that hasn’t been said before. It didn’t make the foundations of religion collapse when it was first said, it won’t now. What’s going to really deconstruct religion is a combination of prosperity and apathy. Prosperity isn’t there now.
Sorry for the delay; had to deal with a few things.
That’s a good point: People are desperate enough believe in a cosmic guardian of humanity that they ignore a lot of glaring contradictions. They will lose that desperation when they learn that they can take better care of themselves and each other without relying on miracles or divine intervention.
Going through each statement:
1. Not a contradiction. You can choose your actions, you cannot choose the consequences. If you don’t want to fall off a cliff, the time to make a choice is before you step over the ledge.
2. Not a contradiction, but a surrender to the Lord’s will. You follow His commandments, and trust His timing. Both require an act of faith. The Lord typically does not do for people what they can do for themselves, and well-rounded religious people understand this. For example, in the New Testament when Lazarus died, his sister was upset that Jesus, who had been informed he was sick, hadn’t been there to heal him. But she still expressed her faith in the Lord. Jesus didn’t say then and there, “Lazarus is alive and waiting for you at home.” He asked to be led to the tomb, asked for the stone to be rolled back, and after calling Lazarus to come out, told them to unwind his grave clothes. He had the people do everything they could do themselves, James 2:24 “For as the body without the sprit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
3. See previous statement. Also,, the concept of martyrdom indicates that the religious do not believe one should prolong one’s life at any and all costs.
4. Only a contradiction for Islamic extremists and the like. The vast majority of other religious people do not believe this.
Note regarding the rare collision of unrelated posts: Apparently Jimmy Buffet died of skin cancer that he was keeping a secret…
1. That analogy does not well describe the Christian paradigm, because the Christian paradigm asserts that an all-powerful being deliberately set up all connections between action and consequence from scratch. A more accurate analogy would be someone strapping you into a cart and pushing it from the top of a hill so it rolls down towards a cliff. Then they say that if you obey them in all things and love them more than anything else, they will catch you with a helicopter and take you to their island paradise. Less “natural consequences of one’s actions” and more “extortion.”
2. That would be a sensible way to do things. The problem I see is that people often expect their deity to aid them after they’ve done all that is humanly possible to solve some problem they consider important, but when that doesn’t happen it’s not counted as evidence against the “loving protector deity” theory.
3. You’re right; there are many people who don’t desperately try to stay alive or pray for their lives to be prolonged, so this isn’t a contradiction for them. It’s a contradiction for those who do meet that description.
4. Maybe the vast majority of religious people don’t believe it today, but the history of Christianity in Europe tells a different story. Can all those warmongering kingdoms even be said to have believed in the same deity as the one that is ascribed authorship of the Ten Commandments?
1. I’d like for other Christians to chime in on this, but this is NOT the Christian paradigm I grew up in. A better analogy would be “I’ll give you this car, but you have to follow the rules of the road, if you choose to break them, bad things are likely to happen.” My church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, teaches that this IS the best reality possible, that God cannot just fix things so nothing unpleasant can ever happen to anyone. There must opposition in all things, otherwise we cannot grow. There are two other aspects that for me, dull the sting of life’s misfortunes. The first being that we chose to experience this mortal life. We don’t remember it, because part of the trial is to see what we will do when we think no-one is watching. The second is that the only thing which matters in eternity is our choices. From this side of mortality, suffering and death can seem very unfair and all-encompassing. But those of us who believe in an eternal view see suffering and death as only temporary. Whatever bad things happen to you in mortality, they will be of no consequence in eternity, except in the matter of helping you grow.
2. If you understand that God is not a genie, prayers not answered the way you want are not evidence against anything.
3 & 4. Your initial comment was directed towards any people of a specific time or mind-set it was a “Deconstruction of monotheistic beliefs”. Perhaps it wasn’t your intention, but you painted a VERY broad brush over Judeo-Christian theology. Not quite a strawman, but close. I hope I and other commenters have demonstrated that the beliefs you outlined are not as prevalent as you seem to think they are. To be fair, I will agree the points you brought up are good for Judeo-Christians to recognize and avoid, but they are not baked into every branch of Judeo-Christian philosophy.
1. That paradigm makes more sense to me, in that struggle and challenge are part of this complete conscious experience. However, I still see some problems with these particular ideas.
First of all, if this is all some sort of voluntary test that requires us to forget that we chose to take the test, then wouldn’t a religion founded on that idea be cheating? If you go around telling people that life is a test with eternity as the stakes, when ignorance of the premise is part of the premise, doesn’t that invalidate the results?
Second, if the purpose of this world is the education of individuals, it is not doing a very good job of that at all. People usually don’t learn unless they are prepared for it. They need to know what sort of things to look for. Otherwise they end up learning unbalanced lessons and treating them as fundamental principles of existence. That’s why I developed a toolbox of foundational concepts, to help people identify the most important aspects of situations and learn to navigate them, rather than getting confused or stuck on bad assumptions.
As far as I can tell, the four fundamental aspects of conscious existence are scarcity/stability, disaster/discovery, stagnation/identity, and conflict/choice. Nobody designed existence to be like that; that’s just how it inherently is. Four subjective factors of being alive: the intersections of the known and unknown with the material and motivational. (I did write a creation myth to illustrate these concepts, though: https://ginnungagapfoundation.wordpress.com/2021/07/19/creation-story-liabilities-or-an-existentialist-allegorical-cosmogony/.)
2 and 3. If you understand that the Abrahamic god is not a genie, people who pray for a specific outcome or who advise other people to do so must fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the deity they are praying to, to the point where it’s debatable whether they subscribe to the same religion as people who pray for more sensible things like inner strength and wisdom. The question I have is why this misunderstanding isn’t swiftly cleared up. If it’s that obvious that the Abrahamic god does not grant wishes, why do so many people persist in acting like it does?
4. Fair point. Identifying hypocrisy does not in principle constitute a deconstruction of Judeo-Christian beliefs. “Thou shalt not kill” is a very good ethical principle. I think what gets me is there have been times when many, if not most, followers of Christianity have claimed their religion makes them morally superior to non-Christians while rejecting what their own religion teaches. That seems like something you could do with a regular ideology, but not a One True Religion. If I were a guardian deity and found out that people were killing each other in my name when I had explicitly told them not to, I’d take completely unambiguous action to protect the integrity of my brand. Otherwise, what was the point of divinely revealing oneself to humans in the first place?
Interesting thoughts. I don’t see religion as “cheating”, since the test of life is open book, so to speak. In effect, we can be tutored throughout the exam, if we are willing. Part of the test is being humble enough to ask the Instructor for help or, in cases like Moses and the burning bush, or Saul on the road to Damascus, answering the call when it’s sent to you. Prayer is an important part of that (like you said, praying for inner strength, wisdom, etc.). As to why do so many people think God is like a genie, it’s because we like the easy solutions, having the right answers given to us rather showing our work (again with the test analogy). I admit this is something I struggle with as well, but I believe I’ve had answers to prayers, both for myself and for others.
Another part of the test is letting people make their own mistakes. God doesn’t have to worry about a “brand”, as He has nothing to prove. I’m sure it upsets Him to see His commandments being broken, especially when the rule-breakers imagine they are doing it in righteousness. But sometime we need to make our own choices without the cosmic equivalent of a shock collar, assuming it would even do the trick. In Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the un-named rich man dies and goes to hell, and Lazarus, a beggar, dies and goes to heaven, to “Abraham’s bosom”. The rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers, and the response is, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.”
“And he said, Nay, father Abraham, but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.”
“And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” (Luke 16:29-31, KJV).
It’s worth noting that this is the only parable of Jesus where a character is named, and he’s named after an individual that Jesus DID raise from the dead, but that didn’t make Jesus’ enemies change their minds about Him. Also, the Israelites under Moses had signs aplenty, but that didn’t stop them constantly whining and rebelling. Anyway I hope this clarifies some things for you, or at least gave you some points ponder,
(And pray about, perhaps?)
Say what you’d say, and did say, to somone named Kate and I’m sure to others before my visits here who were not properly alarmed: You’re sounding a lot like a troll, please stop else I’ll ban your _ _ _ and you’ll be gone never to be heard from again in these pages …
Countering Sis’s petitions to the Lord with “such is my fate”, swearing to go, or not go, “gentle into that good night”, citing acquiescing biblical passages or counter-riddles: no help in persuading a fervent Christian to back off.
gamereg touched on something that – just two days ago – posted on reddit in response to someone calling a friend a “monster” because the guy didn’t study for his exams, assured him that God would help him and then failed all of them.
The reddit user’s friend is not a monster; he’s just spiritually immature. I commented that God is not a magic genie and the Bible is very clear on that.
God is not a capricious Roman or Greek deity like Zeus or Apollo.
God is not a childish icon like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy that you pay lip service to until you don’t get what you want and decide you don’t believe anymore.
God is not a mercurial “Star Trek” alien messing around with you just because he can.
It’s bad enough when the culture at large starts see God in that way but, when people who call themselves Christians treat Him like that, it’s worse.
God can heal. That doesn’t mean He’s obligated to. Prayer does work. But it doesn’t always result in what we think we want. God always answers our prayers. Sometimes, though, the answer is “no”.
The apostle Paul was “all things to all people”. This means that he approached the educated as an educated man; the laymen as a layman, the laborers as a laborer. He was wise enough to use an approach that fit each situation.
There is no One Size Fits All Approach to talk to people about God. We must, however, speak the truth not only with love but with wisdom. The Reddit user’s friend is not wise. Neither is Name Withheld’s sister.
Sis, I know that you are just trying to help and do what you think is best. I love you and appreciate that. Emotionally I just can’t take that approach. God will decide when my time will be with or without my intercession. What I will be praying for is peace, strength, and courage to face each day that God grants me. I have always found God answers me when I pray for what I need and not what I want.
I am a firm believer in the efficacy of prayer. I also know that Jesus told his disciples “When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogue and on street corners so that others may see them. . . but when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door and pray to your father in secret. .. In praying don’t babble like the pagans who think they they will be heard because of their many words.” MT 6 / 5- 7